Mr Hargreaves, I’ll pay for your flight!

By Dan McCurry

So Peter Hargreaves is planning to flee Great Britain in order to avoid a 5% increase in taxes. He announced it in the Sunday Times as if he expected people to burst into tears. Far from it; I suggest we have a whip-round to pay for the flight.

You’re probably asking who is this bloke? Peter Hargreaves earns £10 million a year as the co-founder of the internet stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown. It’s a nothing-special stockbroker; they don’t even give advice, but they were the first to put up a website that allows the public to buy their shares cheaply on the internet and they have a successful business as a result. This is not eBay, there is nothing clever about it; if they hadn’t done it, someone else would have.

So this is not a man who got rich through his brilliant talent. We’re not talking about someone writing Harry Potter in coffee shops between childcare; we’re talking about someone who got lucky with the world-wide-web and now thinks he’s indispensible to this country. The problem is he doesn’t seem to realise that it was this country that gave him the opportunity to be who he is. It was our investment in education and healthcare that creates a productive workforce who have money to invest in shares. If there was no such thing as taxes, there would be no such thing as an economy; without an economy he would never have had any customers for his website and would never have been able to pay himself a £10 million salary.

Not only does he not seem to realise that; he also has such contempt for the country that made him wealthy that he tells us he’ll leave over a measly 5%. How tight is he? My response to him and any of his mates who have the same attitude is this; I’ll pay for the flight!

Dan McCurry writes a regular Sunday post at his new blog.